From the home front: Sheds transformed; Dream Hatcher; House of Tree; growth of tiny house trend

Lowe'sA plain, basic storage shed from Lowe's with a gambrel roof -- something like this one -- was the starting point for architecture students tasked with creating innovative cabins.

Sheds turned into cabins: Woodbury architecture students in Southern California were given the challenge of transforming a basic 10-by-10-foot shed kit from Lowe's into a cabin with sleeping space for two, as well as light, ventilation and insulation. Each of the three teams had a $1,500 budget for other supplies. And each was assigned a material to experiment with: plastic, wood or paper.

In the 'paper cabin,' for instance, beds are hidden under floor panels that, when lifted, become privacy screens. And extra seating can be pulled down from the wall insulation.

The 'plastic cabin' team ironed recycled plastic bottles for their insulation.

Woodbury professor Sonny Ward said: "We forced them to work on a small scale and react to an existing structure. We gave them a storage shed with a gambrel roof because it was challenging. Architecture students are often given a blank slate and told to design an airport for China. This is the opposite."

Dream Hatcher: A former software engineer built an egg-shaped 200-square-foot treehouse in Whistler, B.C., using $10,000 in cast-off materials he found online. All of the main cedar siding comes from a sauna, for instance.

"People thought I had gone a little bit mad," says builder Joel Allen. "I was compulsively refreshing Craigslist every two minutes waiting for that next item to come up and grab it before anyone else."

Trend watch: In a recent Faircompanies video, Kent Griswold of Tiny House Blog discusses the growth of tiny house "trend" (he prefers that term to "movement," which suggests something ephemeral). He's seen the change personally. When he started blogging about tiny houses back in 2007, he had to "dig and scrounge" for stories. Nowadays, he says, he has a year or two of stories just flagged in his email.

Griswold distinguishes between "tiny" and "small," defining small homes as 250 to 1,000 square feet. "The tiny I think is what gets all the public attention, because it is extreme," he says.